Review: Splendour XR, a virtual music festival in your living room
Rather than cancel Splendour in the Grass for another year, organisers are bringing an ‘extended reality’ event to fans at home this weekend.
Rather than face another winter without Splendour in the Grass, the organisers behind one of Australia’s major music events have hatched a plan immune from viral outbreaks: this year, they’re bringing the festival to fans at home.
The first Splendour XR will be staged as a global, “extended reality” event across the weekend, with headline performances from international acts including the Killers, Khalid, Charli XCX and Denzel Curry, as well as Australian artists such as Tash Sultana, Vance Joy, Masked Wolf and the Avalanches. It’s the first time an XR event has been staged on this scale in Australia.
This week, I pulled on a VR headset for an exclusive preview of the brave new world of virtual festival-going. From my garage in suburban Brisbane, I joined a tour led by Sydney-based festival co-founder Jessica Ducrou and a small team in San Francisco who developed Sansar, the social VR platform that powers proceedings. What I saw, felt and heard was both impressive and immersive.
With the headset attached to a PC and a controller in each hand – and a few square metres of space cleared in my garage in which to wander around – I’m transported into an area outside the entrance of the virtual festival.
It’s night time: when I look up, there are stars in the sky and a slight mist blowing in behind me, or perhaps it’s a wayward gust from a smoke machine on one of the main stages nearby.
Our small party of virtual festivalgoers chats away on microphones as we explore, with Ducrou dressed as an oversized talking shark.
My in-game avatar appears as a red robot who looks a bit like Iron Man. Not my style at all.
With a few gestures and clicks of the controls, I’ve soon changed into a tanned, shirtless man sporting yellow fisherman pants, pink high-top sneakers and a purple bum-bag – the very same outfit you’d find me in at any given music festival, naturally.
In the game world, we are boxed in by shipping containers and stalls where we can stock up on virtual shoes and Splendour-branded merchandise, sign up to a new music streaming service or donate to Support Act, the real-life music charity that supports musicians who have fallen on hard times – which is pretty much all of them at present, with very few live shows on the road anywhere in the country.
There’s an ATM where I can buy in-game credits, a van advertising a real-world alcohol delivery service and an empty stall with the NSW Police Force logo. There’s a bunch of doughnuts, coffee cups and walkie-talkies at the desk, but where are the cops?
Oh, the boys and girls in blue are over by the entrance, where, surprisingly, seven police officers and four drug detection dogs have been coded into the virtual festival. Their presence may cause discomfort for those who thought their private consumption habits were safe in their own homes.
Beneath a huge banner bearing the festival name, there’s a rainbow of coloured teleporters to the various music stages. Handily, this removes the necessity of walking several kilometres in the course of a normal day of music-watching.
When we join the Amphitheatre, it’s a solid replica of the big hill at the North Byron Parklands where Splendour is usually held.
There appear to be thousands of people waving and cheering up on the slope, but our group has an area at the front of the main stage, where British pop singer-songwriter Charli XCX is performing solo, microphone in hand, while her music plays through the PA and into my headphones.
Filmed against a green screen somewhere in London, one assumes, the artist born Charlotte Aitchison wears white sneakers, skin-tight shiny blue pants and a ponytail. Overall, she looks like a more realistic version of a Star Wars hologram up there.
I’m largely unfamiliar with Charli’s catalogue, but looking up at a performer on a big stage while immersed in a world that feels a lot like the real thing still gets the heart beating a little faster.
It’s nowhere near as exciting as watching a teeming Amphitheatre crowd heaving to the beats and rhymes of US hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, who headlined in 2018 – but it’s not a bad facsimile, either.
“How are you feeling, Splendour?” she asks between songs, before waving to the crowd and shaking her rump in our direction.
How am I feeling? Honestly, not so great, Charli.
See, the one major downside to the VR experience is a limitation of the technology, or at least of this reporter’s visual cortex, which means an unpleasant sensation of motion sickness gradually building during my time in the game world.
So after a quick whip-around to watch a bit of US rock act Band of Horses at the GW McLennan tent, and British DJ Duke Dumont pumping beats set to a wild light show in the Mix-Up Tent, I need a good break from the headset after about 40 minutes.
This isn’t the first time I’ve fallen temporarily unwell at a music festival – no comment on what may have been in the purple bum-bag – but it’s certainly a novel experience for motion sickness to be a factor.
VR headsets are still a novelty at virtual music festivals. Sansar’s developers say most ticketholders at previous virtual events in Mexico and Germany used their phones, tablets or laptops; less than 10 per cent used true VR.
Each “instance” of the game world is built to comfortably accommodate about 60 people at a time. The platform can be scaled to allow many thousands of instances to run simultaneously, and while not truly limitless in its capacity, the developers say they might start to get concerned if 50 million people tried logging on at once. Which seems unlikely.
And although the event will run from 2pm to 2am on Saturday and Sunday, it’s locked to the Australian timezone, meaning overseas ticketholders will need to stay up to see some of their favourite acts. Organisers say the US and Japan have been particularly strong markets for presales.
After the live event is finished, ticketholders will have another seven days to replay their favourite performances, but they won’t be able to log back into the game world.
So does Splendour XR – which was created with the assistance of $1.67m from the federal government’s Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) fund – portend a future where music festivals are experienced primarily through screens, rather than sharing space with fellow humans in the flesh?
I hope the answer is no, and that this is a one-off, with the normal run of major Australian festivals resuming later this year. Byron Bay Bluesfest is in early October, and Splendour in the Grass is set to return to the North Byron Parklands in late November for its first spring edition.
In the meantime, though, it’s the same old song the world has sung in a pandemic now stretching beyond 18 months: little in our lives is certain, and if you’re a music fan interested in trying something new this weekend, a date in your living room with a star-packed line-up of local and global talent may be just the ticket.
Splendour XR is a virtual event on Saturday and Sunday. For tickets ($30 single day, $50 weekend pass), visit splendourxr.com.
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